I am officially preparing to do my summer research project. I just ordered a bunch of game theory books, a 1 TB external hard drive, and Rock Band 2 for the XBox 360 (and a few other less interesting things).

Last summer was a wash for research because the Peanut came along and filled our lives with sweet baby goodness. This summer she is crawling around, pulling up, and soon to be walking. I am sure that this will limit the work a little, but hopefully nowhere near as much as it did last year :-)

In the grand scheme of things, it is more than worth it!

Now that things are returning to normal (whatever that is) in these parts I guess it's time to get back to work. Today needs to be spent preparing for my upcoming knee surgery and the time off that I am allowing myself afterward.

Today I have got to finish prepping for a dissertation defense tomorrow and finish reading the papers from my Minority Rhetorics seminar so that I can submit grades tomorrow. Oh yeah, and I have to work on the materials that need to be sent out to the new TAs in the next week or so.

Wish me luck!

Peanut Blackmon! It's official.

We are all very excited!

Today is a nasty rainy day and so I didn't even do a to do list. That being said I woke up doing email and have been mired in it ever since. Still nursing the now watery diet coke that I came in with this morning.

In addition to email I have met with a dissertating student and a potential lecture who has visa issues. I need to find a clean coffee cup (or wash one) so that I can have some coffee before I fall over dead asleep in my seat! After that I am leaving to go and read some dissertation chapters!

I am working solely from home today as we seem to be catching a bit of a cold. Working from home can be a good thing or a bad thing for me. Some days are super productive and everything gets done and some days...not so much. Today is a rainy sick day and I feel more like knitting or gaming than working. Unfortunately lethargy has such a hold on me that I am not working, knitting, or gaming!

I am just sitting in front a my laptop at the kitchen table drinking coffee (I love the Keurig machine) and going through email (well that is work, but barely). I am now being called by said email to work on soliciting submissions from Cs caucuses and task forces for an edited collection that I am working on with Cristina Kirklighter and Stephen Parks. I guess that I can do that without expending too much energy. :-)

Ok, off to do some kind of w-o-r-k.

Doing yesterday's 2 do list and have meetings scheduled for C&W 2010 planning (@Purdue ya'll), WPA weekly pow wow with my Assistant Directors, and a meeting with the instructor of an enraged student about said enraged student before meeting with the aforementioned student next week (I love this part of the job >-P ).

So far I have finished the LOR which really only leaves the diss chapter and 3-4 hours of meetings today. Wish me luck! ETA: Got LOR done, did my meetings, finished a junior faculty member's annual review document, talked with the writing lab about a local high school, wrote something else that I remember writing but can't remember what it was right this second!, but no diss chapter today.

On the up side I got to exchange Peanut's All-Stars for the right size and got her 2 other pair of shoes as her feet grow faster than weeds and we find ourselves buying new shoes every 10 minutes.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I started out with a to do list that looked like this:

LOR, letter for files, RC file, KW call, diss chap, prep 4 class

And what did I get done? The letter for the files, the RC file, the KW call, and I prepped for class. Yep, a class that I had to cancel because I had to take the Peanut to urgent care to have her surgical site looked at and taken care of. She is fine and hopefully healing will follow.

So tomorrow's list is going to start with LOR and diss chap. In addition to the gazillion hours of meetings that are on my calendar. Tonight?? Maybe a glass of wine and some Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my cool new blue DSi to decompress.

It seems that I haven;t had any time to blog since becoming WPA. Ok, none since the Peanut was born but WPA-ing made it worse. Now I find myself with a need to keep track of the work that I do as WPA. I work solely on WPA stuff for 4 hours a day and then am supposed to do my own research and teacherly stuff for the rest of the day from home/coffeeshop/library/trunk of my car, but what I find is that everything other than WPA stuff is suffering and I find myself answering email/phone calls/smoke signals/etc. all day and into the night that deal with WPA stuff. How do I stop this or at least keep track of it?

I am now feeling the need to create a daily to do list so that I can get more than WPA stuff done and keep another list of WPA stuff that I actually do during the day. I seem to be a Twitter-aholic so maybe the answer is to do this via Twitter and use hash tags to keep track of it and then go over it at the end of the day? Hmmmmm, yeah I just came up with that. Let me think on that and get back to you.

If you don't Twitter (and don't want to) you can always see my random musings in the left column of this blog ;-P

Ok, off to work.

Just one of those days.

Most days I really like being WPA. No, really. It's not as bad as you think. Or maybe it's just that I enjoy being mean and bossy.

That being said, today is not one of those days. Work is stacking up faster than you can believe and people are bugging me for things that I already did. I don't have time to deal with work that I already did when I have so much to do.

End rant.

You can now return to your regularly scheduled crappy Monday!